[coldtea]

>I think it should be obvious that you won't get rich unless you sell something... None of those people sold things or seemed to be interested in the process of selling things

Obvious under the current system maybe.

Obvious that it should be so, and that it's better that it's so, or that it can only ever be so? Not so much.

I, for one, think that society would be so much better if production of value like what Einstein did or what Tesla did etc, was rewarded with richness, rather than selling something.

For one, we'd have gotten rid of fucking SPAM email and social media leeching on private data to sell ads...

[dwaltrip]

> I, for one, think that society would be so much better if production of value like what Einstein did or what Tesla did etc, was rewarded with richness, rather than selling something.

Unfortunately, there's no mechanism for doing this in a decentralized, dynamic fashion.

The great strength of markets is their decentralized and dynamic nature. They are the original hivemind and crowd-sourced wisdom. Of course, they have many weaknesses (especially with the corruptibility of governments). But for now, it seems these weaknesses are best handled by continually attempting to apply layers of patches and one-off fixes, instead of altering it fundamentally. Perhaps advanced AI will enable a new paradigm... although I would certainly not want to rush into such an enormous change.

I do agree that we can do a better job of rewarding and incentivizing fundamental research and innovation. But it's not going to be easy. Part of the problem is that it often take significant hindsight to know which breakthroughs are the most important.

[coldtea]

>The great strength of markets is their decentralized and dynamic nature. They are the original hivemind and crowd-sourced wisdom.

The problem is that markets optimize for one thing, to the detriment of all others: profit.

Anything else (e.g. more inventions, etc) is a byproduct. If avoiding it will bring more profit, that's totally fine for the actors involved.

And it's not even long term profit (which, because of costs to reputation and such, will require more good behavior) -- quick term profit is equally good a motive under such a market system, human costs and externalities be damned.

Under such a system, if people could sell baby milk mixed with chlorine to make a profit, they would (and they have -- among countless of other examples of putting profit first).

We should create and foster decentralized and dynamic systems that optimize for a better world in aspects that we want -- instead of piggybacking on a naturally occurring decentralized system based on greed like monkeys.